In the metropolitan, the parents in most of the family are necessary to work outside, leaving baby, pet, child, elder or etc. with housekeeper at home. They cannot instantly view and control objects, receive alerts and monitor the events happening at home.
Presently, a plurality of cameras and/or responders are required for positioning objects, which results in expensive cost of hardware. General users may need to consult an engineer to do the hardware installation and set up each object with the aid of complex software menu. Some smart home systems currently available in the market allow a user to input the floor plan that may easily locate objects, and thus reduce the confusion of searching same objects at different location. However, there is no indication and tracking way to confirm which object and where the object to be correctly positioned. Most of existing smart home systems use cameras for monitoring purpose only and but control electronic objects through cable or wireless technology separately from the cameras, the images of the objects captured by the cameras are not used to control the objects, thus these systems cannot simultaneously position and control an object in real scene. The following table shows some technologies used in the current systems:
SolutionsPositioningControlling1Wireless communication NoYesas 433 MHz, 900 MHz, 2.4 GHz or etc.2RFID systemNoNo3Infra-Red (IR)NoYes43 sets of ultra-sonicYes Noresponder(single object)53 sets of cameraYesNo
Due to above technical limitations, there is no solution which can provide instant positioning of an object in real scene with only one camera, and which can allow the user to control an electronic object in real scene after the positioning and to achieve recognizing, positioning and control simultaneously. So the smart home system and other existing solutions are not user friendly because they are quite complicated and the user is required to take a lot of time to do hardware installation via cable or wireless network and software setup for each object. With the existing systems, the user cannot determine exact location and instantaneous scene of the object, and tends to mix up the control of the object with instantaneous alert originating from the same object. Moreover, the existing systems need a plurality of cameras and/or responders for searching and positioning objects and thus require for expensive cost for hardware.